Santa's Experiment with Prehospital Thermometers Shows They're Reliable

Santa convened a special Santa Summit at the North Pole two years ago, inviting his elves and reindeer handlers as well as the JEMS editorial staff and medical experts from several countries. The reason: His concern over insidious sepsis and deadly septic shock—conditions he felt EMS agencies should be aware of and, more importantly, do something about. After serving milk and cookies for breakfast, Santa started the summit by defining sepsis as "generalized body poisoning by the products of bacteria," and noted that it's affecting and killing more people than it should.1 He became emotional and said he was tired of removing 258,000 nice people from his holiday list each year because their sepsis was allowed to progress to septic shock.2 He couldn't believe the numbers provided by his elves, but after checking the list twice, he realized that severe cases of sepsis can advance to septic shock when systemic inflammation causes blood clots to develop and block oxygen from vital organs.3 He shocked the attendees when he told them that patients who do survive can experience severe medical consequences when their sepsis is missed, frequently having to have their fingers, hands, toes and feet amputated.4 Why? Vasopressers are used to maintain a septic patient's blood pressure sufficiently to keep them alive while the antibiotics kill the infection, but they often cause gangrene, which leads to the amputation of their precious limbs.4
Source: JEMS Patient Care - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Columns Patient Care Source Type: news